Stop the presses: Countries that spend money to reduce povertyactually reduce poverty. Go figure. (The Great Society, by the way, cut the U.S. poverty rate in half until retrenchment began in the ’70s under Nixon.)

Speaking of the American South, since the flooding began in South Carolina, we’ve heard that some dams burst or had to be opened before they burst, and we’ve learned that the state’s dams are in pretty crummy shape. Well, no surprise, the same is true here in North Carolina.

The first rule of legislating ought to be “First, do no harm.” And would that the N.C. General Assembly had stuck to that with respect to the solar-energy industry. But it didn’t. And that will have real costs.

In North Carolina, the labor commissioner is best known as the name and face on elevator inspection placards. But the position must do other things, too, like seek restitution for unpaid workers — which incumbent Cherie Berryhas pretty much failed to do.

The fascists at ALEC are now trying to water down American history as it is taught in North Carolina. My friend Mark Barrett (Governor’s School ’77, Davidson ’82) shines some light on the subject.

82-year-old Syrian scholar Khaled al-Assad, despite having been kidnapped by ISIS, refused to tell the group where some valuable antiquities were hidden. So they beheaded him. Compare him to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who whistled while Iraq’s invaluable antiquities were looted during and after the U.S. invasion of that country, declaring, “Freedom is untidy.”

The 116 remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay are supposed to be “the worst of the worst,” but only three of them were captured by U.S. forces. For the rest, we have to take the word of Afghan and Pakistani government officials, spies, and warlords, none of whom are capable of screwups or would ever have a motive for falsely turning someone in, of course.

The Ashley Madison hack has me of two minds. I’m thrilled that Josh Duggar has been outed not only as a kiddy diddler but also as a cheat. OTOH, that information was stolen, plain and simple. So where do I come down? I think the info shouldn’t have been stolen and made public. I’m still having a big ol’ mug of schadenfreude over Josh, though.

So, yet again, North Carolina’s General Assembly, WHICH HAD ONE JOB, not that I am bitter or anything, has failed to pass a budget. For those of you keeping score, the budget was due June 30. So here’s my suggestion: Henceforth, all compensation due legislators will be held in escrow until a budget is passed, and no legislator will be compensated beyond June 30 unless a budget has been passed by June 30.

Live and learn: Bumcombe County, whose seat is the liberal hotbed of Asheville, never has had an African American county commissioner. For those of you with any skin in Bumcombe County politics, this candidate bears watching.

Apparently there are some students paying more than $50,000 a year to attend Duke Universitywho think their whims should be catered to. Well, kids, college is a place for learning, and one of the first things you need to learn is how to grapple with ideas with which you disagree.

Perhaps no major American pundit has been more loudly and frequently wrong than David Brooks, so Flying Spaghetti Monster bless the blogger Driftglass, whose chronicles of Brooks’s unpunished and deadly wrongness will be essential reading in journalism courses a century from now. This is just one tasty example.

There’s gonna be a NASCAR race this year called the SpongeBob SquarePants 400. I am absolutely not making this up. As Ed Thomas says on Facebook, it’ll be interesting to see how they dry the track when it rains.

Oh, good. Another war. Because we were running out of them, or something. People, ISIS is NOT an existential threat to this country. If you think otherwise, imagine ISIS trying to capture Detroit or Dallas, mmkay? Relatedly, if Chris Matthewswants a war so damned badly, let him go fight it himself.

Our “allies” in Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t allowed to drive, apparently believe women drive in the U.S. and elsewhere because they don’t care whether they get raped. Evil AND stupid is no way to go through life, son.

FBI director James Comey is urging Americans to panic about possible ISIS militants under their beds. It’s a real shame the Snowden revelations and that lib’rul Obama cut back so badly on our nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities; otherwise, we wouldn’t need to wet our pants like this. Oh. Wait.

#AdviceToYoungJournalists is trending on Twitter. Here’s mine: Run. Save yourself. While you still can.

Cops in N.C. are spying on citizens. One would think the GOP-controlled legislature might want to do something about Big Gummint, but one would think that only if one believed Republicans are serious about stemming the overreach of Big Gummint.

NBC’s Brian Williamsgets suspended for six months for misremembering what happened in Iraq. Good. But Alberto Gonzalez took the Fifth 67 times before Congress, and we’re still paying his ass. Just saying.

I’m starting to think technology and Republicans just don’t mix. This week, the N.C. legislature’s main website went down after — no kidding — someone forgot to renew the domain.

What happens if the anti-ACA case King v. Burwell, now before the Supremes, results in the ACA (or at least the part about exchanges) being overturned? Insurance exec Richard Mayhew says it won’t be pretty, with most subsidized exchange policies being yanked this summer. But wait! There’s more!

After [those policies are yanked], the remaining individual insurance market now looks like the pre-PPACA New York State insurance market, where there is guarantee issue and no medical underwriting but no subsidies and no mandates to get healthy people into the risk pool. We get a death spiral where average premiums for a 30 year old would almost double in two years, and most reasonably healthy people who otherwise would have qualified for subsidies now sit out of the market because they can’t afford the coverage.

So because I think Binyamin Netanyahu is a sociopath who has led Israel down a dangerously self-destructive path and who (as is true of any other head of state) has no business addressing our government without an invitation from the head of that government, Joe “Ratings Lower Than Whale Poop in the Marianas Trench at High Tide” Scarboroughthinks I’m anti-Semitic. Fortunately, Dave Winer, the Godfather of Blogging, has a response: “Let me jewsplain that for you: chuck is a goy schmuck asshole schmeggegey nazi idiot dick.”

Some people just don’t have the temperament to be lawyers. Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, not for the first time, is demonstrating that he is one of those people, ordering officials in that state to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 legalization of same-sex marriage there. Coming into today, Alabama was 0-2 in nullification contests, and it began losing again today not long after county offices opened for business. Sorry, Roy. And screw you with a fence post, bigot.

They say that the first person in any political argument who stoops to invoking Nazi Germany automatically loses. But you can look it up: According to a 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the English word “privatization” derives from a coinage, Reprivatisierung, formulated in the 1930s to describe the Third Reich’s policy of winning businessmen’s loyalty by handing over state property to them.

(Seriously. I had no idea.)

There might be a case for not publishing some of the Charlie Hebdo images, but outgoing NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matosutterly fails to make it.

A former chairman of the state’s Mining and Energy Commission, Jim Womack, gets all butthurt over the fact that a Lee County coffee-shop owner doesn’t want Duke Energy’s coal ash dumped in her back yard. Because Womack was having trouble understanding the owner’s position, I wish she’d’ve spooned some coal ash into his coffee.

Here in Greensboro, a patron at New Orleans Bar & Grille on Big Tree Way was unsatisfied with his steak Saturday night and started filming a review, when restaurant employees not only interrupted but also stole their phones. My wife’s from Louisiana, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before we set foot in that place. This deserves to go viral so hard that not even the owners’ grandchildren’s grandchildren will ever be able to try to start a business here. And the restaurant employees need to go to prison.

Let it never be said I’m not tough on crime. Y’all have a good evening.